I released F-Spot 0.2.2 today. It’s better than ever so drop everything and give it a whirl.

So much has been happening the world of F-Spot that I won’t try to cover everything now. I do however want to touch on a few highlights. Most visibly, the work Gabriel Burt has been doing on a new query interface has finally become part of F-Spot. You can find a good description of the new interface at his blog and if you were lucky enough to be at the Boston summit you may have seen his demo. The new interface is major improvement over the old but expect several revisions as we try to streamline and polish it.

The query interface is hardly the only thing new in 0.2.2, Stephane has been fixing so many problems large and small that it is hard to keep up with him. This includes doing the work to move F-Spot to the new managed dbus-sharp bindings. So if you were having dbus related problems before it would be a good time to try things out again. Of course if you start having problems please speak up.

That’s all I have time to cover for now but there is much more I’ll go over in the future. Until then enjoy the new release and a little bit of fall.

This is the best news I’ve heard in a while. It’s very nice to have F-Spot and the other mono apps gain new users and see the gnome desktop move a little closer to a shared vision. On a personal level it also feels good when you can convince yourself that your vote counts.

Before long the chain broke; then the motorcycle ran out of gas. Ewing abandoned the bike, hopped a freight train, and fell in with two hoboes. The trio was discovered by a brakeman, who intended to rob Ewing of his money and watch. Ewing with persuasive-but true-story about being a poor college student, talked the man into returning the cash and timepiece.

The ordeal was no over, however. Eventually the hoboes attacked Ewing. Desipite being hit by a blackjack, he feigned insanity long enough to get away-but not without a chase. The attackers lost track of him as he hid in a churchyard.

The story is about my grandfather’s brother (my great uncle) and the book the book was given to me by my brother John. In an unrelated but not entirely unforeseeable turn of events I also gave John a book about hobos this Christmas. I guess we know each other pretty well.

Evolution work went very slowly this week. Fixing bugs can be fun when you can isolate them easily, I couldn't. In the process of trying to isolate those bugs I found and filed all sorts of nasty new bugs. There is a lot of work to do for the 2.0 release.

Late in the evenings I spent some time reading F-Spot code and adding things that occured to me along the way. You can now actually add and remove tags from images with the UI which means people can finally play with the treeview filtering stuff and see it in action. In the process I fixed a few bugs and sped up the icon view redraw a little. So many fun things to hack on.

Nat announced our F-Spot plans and I quickly heard from a lot of people. There were many kind offers of encouragement and help. It's a great feeling to be starting on something new and get such enthusiastic feedback. I can't wait to start harassing rml. Of course there is a lot of evolution work to finish before 2.0 is ready so I'll be focusing that until it is done.

I've spent my few free moments reading through the F-Spot code and thinking about future plans. The TODO Ettore left in cvs does a good job of covering where things are headed with F-Spot development. I'm sure it will grow and change as development moves forward but his
ideas were strong and compelling.

On the evolution side of things network changes that happened durring the Ximian office move have made connector work slow going for the last couple of weeks. I'm completely cut off from the test server and after trying virtually every concievable method of getting access I've finally given up. I'll be using a different server until the network issues are resolved.

More gtkhtml work. I finally unified the display type variable and the level variable, then reworked some of the stack code to use the new settings. The parser is a little more fexible now and I'm happy with the direction of the changes.

I talked to Radek a little about the code he has been working on, it sounds quite nice. Hopefully he'll be able to merge it back into the trunk soon. I think both of us wish we had a little more time to finish this round of refactoring before moving on to other things.

Lots of drawing lately. The first couple of drawings I went ahead and scannedandinked.
Since then I've just been leaving them in the sketch book since they are largely just exercises. The drawing has been enjoyable and I've noticed some improvement since the boston trip.

For a short time today I actually had my scanner, photo printer, laser printer and Wacom tablet all working at the same time. Eight years of wishing seems to have finially paid off. Wow.

Of course I tempted fate by bragging and soon after the gimp finally gave up and stopped recognizing that I was using the tablet when over the toolbox area which makes it a real pain to change tools, colors, brushes etc. Oh well, it was magical while it lasted.

While things were working I "inked" the sketch of Ettore . It was fun using the gimp again but fairly depressing to see that functionaly it is still pretty much the same as it has been since 2000. The UI is greatly improved but there is still no autosave, adjustment layers or line art helpers. Obviously I'm biased toward certain features but any one of those would have made me happy.

One of the things I keep coming across when trying to color the line art is that the fill tool is a constant source of frustration. The bordering effects you get when trying to fill solid areas require far to much manual cleanup. As a workaround I added an old hack back into my tree that simply grows the fill selection by two pixels before it colors it, but that is obviously less than ideal in the long run. Passing a grow radius to the fill function would be nice but it already has something like 13 arguments and I just didn't have the heart to do it.

I'm sure someone has come up with a good algorithm for bucket filling line art that avoids the fringing but a quick search on google didn't turn up anything. If I can come up with some more time I may try to do a more exhaustive search.